Software Architect

Ascend Learning is a national leader in data driven, online educational solutions for learners, educators and employers in high-growth, licensure-driven professions spanning healthcare, fitness and wellness, skilled trades, insurance and financial services. We are passionate about accelerating learning while impacting job readiness, employment success and employee retention with the belief that our work changes lives.

Our culture is intentionally results-driven and selfless with a relentless focus on our customers. We believe in trust, transparency, freedom and responsibility with a commitment to meritocracy, inclusion and diversity of thought. Continual investment in our over 1500 employees is also a core principle realized through ongoing professional development and providing opportunities to grow, develop and lead. Ascend Learning is headquartered in Burlington, MA with additional office locations and remote workers in cities across the U.S.

Ascend Learning is seeking a motivated, energetic individual with strong software architecture experience as well as good communication and leadership skills for the position of Software Architect.

Ascend Learning is hiring a Software Architect. As a Software Architect, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining formal documentation of application and integration architectures. This includes the design and documentation of individual projects based on a micro-services architecture as well as corporate-wide integration of those services. Project architectures may include any of the following: documentation and presentation of original design, application of approved tech stack and company standards, data modeling, data transfer contracts, security risk mitigation, and implementation assistance. This position can work from one of our office locations in Leawood, KS/hybrid, Minneapolis, MN/hybrid or Burlington, MA/hybrid preferred. Remote considered.

This is an individual contributor role working with a team of software architects. This role is expected to interact with business resources, development leads, QE resources, the Chief Architect, and members of the senior leadership team, as appropriate.

The Software Architect will represent the experiential learning, credentialing, and platform services competencies, designing and assisting in the implementation of company-wide, uniform architectures across multiple platforms and projects within these three areas of focus. Successful architectures will apply to all Business Units within Ascend, simplifying the development and maintenance of functionality related to these three core competencies.

In addition to the logical responsibilities, a firm understanding of some of the underlying technologies used by Ascend Learning Engineering is required. This includes technologies such as:

• Programming Languages - .Net/C#, Java, PHP, Ruby
• Services Frameworks - Asp.Net Core, Sinatra/Rails
• Data stores - Sql Server, MySql, Redis
• Data serialization - JSON, XML, Avro
• Documentation - Sparx Enterprise Architect, UML, Container/Component/Sequence/etc. diagrams
• Asynchronous Messaging - Kafka
• Authentication/Authorization - SAML, Oauth, OpenID Connect
• Online Learning Protocols - LTI, SCORM, xAPI, TinCan

Responsibilities:

• Support Software Architecture for multiple projects across multiple platforms with a focus on one or more key competencies
• Work with teams of 20+ individuals on- and off-shore
• Understand the business process; facilitate the discovery of entities, attributes, relationships, and business rules from functional experts and the user community
• Prepare software models to document structures, services, data and information flows for sourcing and accessing data throughout the enterprise
• Develop and enforce development standards and best practices
• Evaluate current environments, conduct research, recommend, and implement innovative designs that can enhance the reliability, security, productivity, and efficiency of systems
• Assist IT functional teams troubleshooting critical business systems
• Ensure that a state of high availability is maintained for top tier applications
• Act as a core team member of the Ascend Learning Architecture Council, supporting the process of validating and directing the architectural progress of the entire company
• Work closely with CISO on company security policies and governance of data across the company
• Mentor members of the implementation teams on development, best practices, standards, etc.
• Work with the development, quality engineering, DBAs, information security, network, operations, and product management teams to design and implement new business initiatives as related to microservices, user interfaces, and analytics.
• Work independently with minimal direction
• Work effectively on geographically diverse teams
• Build trust and works collaboratively with all levels of the Tech and Ops organization, including staff, business stakeholders, and executives
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with all levels of users and management
• Strong influencing, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills

Education and Experience:

• Big picture / High-level architecture: The candidate must be able to think at a high level about the overall systems and goals of the projects
• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent work experience
• Minimum 5 years of software architecture, design, and implementation with a variety of technologies
• Experience with REST services
• Experience with stream processing platforms such as Kafka
• Agile development and scrum team experience
• Preferred experience:
• Full-stack web development experience
• Experience with front-end web frameworks (e.g. Angular)
• Architecture or development related certifications
• Experience with large-scale, near real-time applications
• Education or e-Learning background is a huge plus
• Distributed systems understanding
• Public cloud experience e.g. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud

Skills and Abilities:

• Proven capability to differentiate between the appropriateness of relational and non-relational database solutions, and the ability to work with the team to match data architectures to storage solutions
• Familiarity with code execution and deployments to development, staging and production environments dictated by through a formal change management process
• Understanding of architecture principles around microservices
• Disciplined, dynamic and flexible to manage multiple projects and tasks, work effectively in a rapidly changing environment and meet ongoing and overlapping deadlines
• Work weekends/nights on occasion for on-call incident troubleshooting or administration of regular, off-hour deployments
• Must be able to produce clear documentation to convey architecture, development standards, roadmaps, and potential challenges to all both technical and non-technical resources
• Passion and the ability to learn new things

Ascend Learning, LLC is proud to be an equal opportunity employer (M/F/Vets/Disabled). No agency or search firm submissions will be accepted. Applications for U.S. based positions with Ascend Learning, LLC must be legally authorized to work in the United States and verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

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